ON Thursday, the Supreme Court allowed the appointment of ad-hoc judges to the high courts to deal with the whopping pendency of cases.
A three-judge Bench comprising Chief Justice of India (CJI) Sanjiv Khanna, Justices B.R. Gavai and Surya Kant also directed that the number of ad-hoc judges should not exceed 10% of the sanctioned strength in a high court.
The Bench also said that ad-hoc judges would sit in a Bench presided over by a sitting high court judge to decide pending criminal appeals.
As per the National Judicial Data Grid (NJDG), recent data indicates that there has been an increase in pendency levels in almost all the high courts. Around sixty-two lakhs cases were pending before the high courts in India as of January 25, 2025, of which more than eighteen-lakhs twenty-thousand cases were criminal cases and more than forty lakhs cases were civil.
